Another D&D Next Playtest Survey

WotC has just sent out details for another official playtest survey; this one dealing with wizards and clerics.

We hope you have been enjoying the materials we have provided so far in the Dungeons & Dragons« Next playtest. At this stage in the process, we are eager to hear your thoughts on which spells are essential to D&D wizards and clerics.

Please click the link below to complete the second D&D playtest survey, administered by SurveyGizmo. The survey begins on July 18, 2012, and you can provide your feedback anytime thereafter, until the playtest officially ends. The D&D team will review the results and use the feedback to help inform our efforts.

Please don't close your browser before finishing the survey, as you won't be able to get back in to complete it.

We also have a host of activities at Gen Con 2012 related to the D&D Next playtest, which you may be interested in. Even if you aren’t attending the convention, our keynote address and seminars will be made available after the show on our web site. For information on our Gen Con activities, visit DungeonsandDragons.com/events.

Thanks in advance for your participation. We're excited to hear from you!

It felt very 3e-centric in regards to spell names. Although my memory is fuzzy in terms of the spell name changes between 2e and 3e and between 3.0e and 3.5e.

I'm not sure of the point of this survey. Any spell than has been in >2.5 editions should probably be updated and in the Core book. We don't need a repeat of 4e where iconic and recognisable Name elements are held back for four years.

It might be a bar-setting exercise. Find out what the community thinks are the coolest and most memorable spells of each level and make those the best. Use them to set the power curve or magic and establish the benchmarks. The easy example is fireball: if you want to deal AoE damage that's the gold standard.

I found this to be a frustrating exercise. There are some iconic spells--sleep, fireball, cure light wounds, heal, etc. But there are lots of iconic categories of powers--illusion, summoning, healing, and so forth. I really don't care if Lesser Planar Binding or Major Image are on the spell lists. But I care a lot about summoning and illusion categories of powers being well represented in the wizard class's spells.

I had the experience of realising that the iconic spells in my head were usually the ones I either always cast or had amusing stories associated with them in game. Like Stone Shape for instance, probably not iconic to most, but to me it saved our lives once in a dungeon where we abused the spell definition to form a giant spike to drop on the bad guy's head.

I commented on nearly every section, trying to say why I didn't pick certain things. Particularly why I chose lots of damage spells, even though I don't think that's all Wizards should do. Similarly for Clerics, who have far fewer iconic spells I think, and those like Flame Strike and Blade Barrier probably shouldn't be for every Cleric.

I created a thread a while back discussing this - they have a good chance to redefine everything about magic. Schools, types, damages, durations, saves, keywords, effects, power levels, the lot. They should rebuild from scratch, because, most of all, that list reminded me how the D&D spell list was grown organically from how O/1/2e functioned, and the game doesn't function like that any more.

Everyone is weird, but those who are weird in the same way call themselves normal.

Pretty much agree...I also found myself looking for illusion spells, even though the names were not nec. iconic. And yes, it would just be easier to use the 2E PHB, (which is basically 1E PHB + 1E UA), it would get you 95% there.

One point I found myself coming back to in the comments was to clean up the number of spells that have similar or inverse applications. Do we really need both Daylight and Darkness to be seperate spells? Do we really need Animate Dead/Create Undead/Create Greater Undead as diffenerent spells? Not to mention all the Lesser/Greater variants. I think not. I'd rather see them create one spell that has different applications depending on either caster level or spell level memorized.

"Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail." ~ Charles Dickens

For me, I would have preferred to see what kinds of spells were most popular, not jsut going by names. I made sure to check spells ofr the effects, not necessarily the names. I want summoning again, I want planer travel, _i want versatile spellcasting.